Gum Delay

Today’s big Sunday cartoon is about the mixed bag of convenience we get from technology. Historically speaking, each generation witnesses more change than the ones before it. A couple of thousand years ago, a person was lucky to come across a single new invention in their entire lifetime. Five hundred years ago, you might see two or three in a lifetime. A hundred years ago, during the Industrial Revolution, things really heated up and people’s heads were spinning with new inventions coming at them at the alarming speed of one every five years or so. Today, in the time it has taken me to type this paragraph, there have been as many new inventions as there are letters typed. How do I know this? Because of a little invention called lying with authority. I made all these figures up, but I’m guessing they’re more-or-less historically true up to that last one about each letter of this paragraph.

The larger point is that we tend to incorporate these inventions into our lives and then can’t live without them. Imagine if smart phones suddenly stopped working all over the world. Everyone would have to walk around shouting what we would normally be tweeting, and carry our food plates through the streets to show people what we ordered instead of just posting it on FacadeBook. It would be chaos.

Lastly, I recommend embiggenating the cartoon above so you can see all of the small jokes I incorporated into the product labels. I’m certain you will find and extra smile or two hidden on the shelves of the “Shop ‘n’ Leave”.

When I drew and submitted this cartoon (several weeks ago) I wondered if the weather would be hot when it published, but with the record heat worldwide in recent years, it wasn’t much of a gamble. Thanks and a shout-out to my email friend in Canada named Russell who suggested I do a pun on “daily weather report” using the name of the famous surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. Sadly, I’m afraid we’re all in for flaming giraffes and melting clocks for most of the rest of our lives––even the climate change deniers, who sweat at the same rate the rest of us do.

This pirate cartoon was suggested by my good friend, Cliff Harris the King of Wordplay. This isn’t wordplay, really, but I thought the hooks being mistaken for air quotes was amusing. And, since here in the U.S. the ultimate corporate pirate is shamefully close to the most powerful office in the world, it’s also fairly timely. (For those of you tempted to write something predictable about Hillary being a pirate, note that I said “corporate” pirate and her misdeeds have been in the world of politics, not business.) (For those of you tempted to say something predictable like “what’s the difference between politics and business?”, okay, you got me.)

This hunter cartoon has a fun story behind it. The day that it published, several people contacted me via the Interwebs to tell me that there was a mistake in the picture, and they were right. Have you spotted it yet? I’m a stickler for details and so I had a good laugh at myself that I had not noticed it until readers pointed it out. I then posted it on FB and Twitter asking who else could catch it and most people responded accurately, but a few got lost in my Secret Symbols, like the eyeball in the chair, which are not mistakes and appear in most of my cartoons. The mistake I’m talking about has been corrected in the cartoon posted below and an explanation of it follows. So don’t scroll down yet if you want to see if you can find the mistake in the original first.

Observant readers will have noticed that in my original drawing, the hand the hunter mounted in the crocodile’s stead is a left hand, but the hand the hunter is missing is his right. In the second cartoon posted here I corrected the drawing. I’m not sure why I didn’t notice it when I drew it, I guess I was sleepwalking through my work that day and just drew the hand without thinking about which hand he was missing. I’m glad people caught it and told me so I could get a good laugh, though. As I am known to say, if you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re not allowed to laugh at others, either.

Several posters attempting to answer the question got lost in other kinds of arcane details, like the fact that if a crocodile had bitten off the man’s arm he would not have been able to get it back for his trophy room, but that’s easily remedied by imagining that the crocodile is highly allergic to human flesh and sneezed heartily before he could swallow.

This brother-in-law gag is about an old expression “When they made him(her) they broke the mold”, meaning that a person is unique, and also about something we’ve all experienced where siblings within the same family can be very alike and yet utterly dissimilar. I could list examples from my own life but then people might get embarrassed.

If I may be immodest for a moment, I’d like to say that this cartoon about #NeverMagellan is one of my favorites in forever. It’s strange and funny and sad and true. And it says something about the Trump campaign and its followers that isn’t often addressed: Going backward in time with protectionism, tough-talk, racial innuendo, insults, pride in ignorance, denial of science, big walls that keep “bad guys” out, etc., is something that has been tried again and again in times of heightened fear but never works. Is the world a dangerous place and are there bad guys who mean you harm? Yes––always has been, always will be. Can a tough guy protect you? Not in a democracy. You need a ruthless dictator and closed borders for that kind of “protection”. Are the people who live in countries like that happy? Ask people who lived behind the Iron Curtain or any number of other countries with ass-kicking “strongmen” in their front office.

“If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.” ––Dwight D. Eisenhower

I’ve long thought that dogs more often exhibit the kinds of traits we attribute to gods than do humans. I think the popular bumper sticker says it brilliantly––“Dear God, please help me to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.” And of course, none of us are.

I got lots of positive messages about how much people liked this dog cartoon, one predictable comment from someone who thought I was insulting their Christian god, and one cliche comment right out of the scripts at Fox News which I’ve gotten each time I poke fun at Christian mythology, asking if I would dare do this cartoon about “the Muslim god”. In response to this comment I always hasten to point out that Christianity and Islam are offshoots of ancient Judaism (itself an evolution of previous mythologies) and that historically speaking, all three of those religions worship the same “God of Abraham,” even though many of their modern followers have long forgotten that fact. My favorite oddball comment was someone who asked me if I was a member of the Illuminati because I had put an eyeball and a pyramid on god’s throne. No, I’m not. Cartoonists deal in cliches to get ideas across and those seemed to fit.

If you’ve read this far I deeply appreciate your effort and hope you found it enjoyable. As the newspaper industry dwindles, most of my readers receive it for free on the Internet. If you’re one of those folks, I humbly ask that you consider a monthly contribution to my efforts or a one-time donation, which you can accomplish by going here. Much appreciated, Jazz Pickles!

Another way to support me and Olive Oyl is to purchase a signed and numbered, limited edition, color, framed, fine art print of one of my favorite Bizarro cartoons from this site. They also have a small number of original black and white ink drawings from Bizarro. Thanks!

I’ve always loved your work. Thanks. Re. your crocodile hunter left/right hand cartoon, I also wondered how it is that he got his severed arm back but still doesn’t have the croc’s head. Did the croc not like it and spit it out. I’m awake nights….

I can answer why you used the left hand for the trophy hunter panel, because visually it is stronger than drawing the right hand in this situation, thumb and four fingers says “hand” faster than just four fingers.

Just wondering if Dog could make the world flat again in special places, where the technology works “however” and the broken mold is never remade? Or not, as the case may be. . . as long as there are no air quotes!

Does it tell you everything you need to know about the NYT, though, to know that they had originally reported Aleppo as something else, wrongly? They realized the error after several Twitter users pointed it out, and changed it without making a correction edit.. which is oddly similar to the very criticism they try to make about Johnson himself =P

A pirate has a hook, a peg-leg, and an eyepatch, and someone asks him, “How did you lose the leg?”
He says “Arr, I be havin’ lost that when me ship wrecked and I had to cut meself free.”
The other person asks “How did you lose the hand?”
He says “Arr, I be havin’ that shot off by the Admirality.”
The other person asks “How did you lose the eye?”
He says “Arr, I be just havin’ got the hook, when a seagull crapped on my face…”

In 2015, there were 629,647 patent applications filed. Divided across 8,760 hours per year, that’s 71.9 patent applications per hour. There were 745 characters in your paragraph. Therefore, your statement was true if it took you 10.4 hours or more to type.

I assume you’ve googled it by now. Seems there’s a new oil pipeline in the works every month or so. This particular one is meeting stiff resistance from Native Americans, especially since the developers allegedly bulldozed some of their sacred places in a sneak attack on Labor Day weekend. This is the first time since the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 that all seven divisions of the Sioux Tribe have come together. People from all over the country have joined in the protest. I’ve been following it in the news for the past couple weeks.

I’m not the original poster, but #NoDAPL is the anti Dakota Access Pipeline movement. Basically, there’s this pipeline that is supposed be built to transport oil to from Canada to another pipeline that goes to the Gulf of Mexico, where it will be shipped abroad. Residents living near the Missouri river as well as many other people take exception to the building of this pipeline because: 1. It crosses the Missouri River in several places, which is the primary source of drinking water there, and there is a strong potential for pipeline burst and contamination of the river. 2. The DAPL building route is right next to the Sioux reservation, and there are many that claim that it goes through unmarked/unmapped Native cemeteries and other sacred spots.

I expect that, like me, you didn’t realise that you already knew what #NoDAPL was but you simply weren’t aware of the hashtag acronym. Fortunately, Google is our friend in these cases. I was led directly to Waging Nonviolence’s article, “How #NoDAPL united a movement for indigenous rights”

I can *so* relate to today’s comic: I work in a deli at a large grocery store, and they recently changed our product coding…not only did they go from 2-4 digit codes to 5 digits, at least half of the new codes don’t work, nor do many of the old ones, forcing us to use the “search” function, which is way more finicky than the original Yahoo! ever was.

A question about the same comic: is 19 a new record for the largest number of Secret Symbols in one strip?

I immediately noticed the hunter’s hand but then thought that perhaps he had simply been born with two left hands. I was all prepared to start a petition to publicly censure you for being insensitive to people who had two left hands, and claim that my father had two left hands and he was a successful crocodile hunter so your cartoon was completely inaccurate and a slam at all the two-left-handed hunters in the world. I was getting all worked up about it and then you had to go and say you had simply made a mistake. What am I going to do now about all my dudgeon, high as it is? Don’t tell me I have to waste all that dudgeon!
(Bonus question: Can dudgeon ever NOT be “high”? Can there be low or medium dudgeon?)
P.S. Love your humor and your cartoons very much.

If we go off of what those of us with religious families were taught, I image the scenario leading to that moment going like: God creates man in his own image. Man creates dogs. God looks down and says, “Well fuck! I didn’t expect them to make something better!”